History by Magazine -- Sports Illustrated made millions by uncovering young girls at the beach
In 1994 the now dead mag's annual swimsuit issue was hot and wet and selling 2 million copies on newsstands. My weekly take on America's news, culture and ideas -- from exactly 30 years ago.
RIP, SI.
Sports Illustrated — once one of our greatest magazines — is essentially dead and buried.
The ‘cultural touchstone’ was murdered by the usual gang of nasty suspects — the Internet, cultural shifts and the cruel economics of the post-print era.
Here’s some detail from Business Insider.
SI’s highly profitable swimsuit issue was an annual pseudo-sports event that became as important to America's month of February as the idiot-circus surrounding Punxsutawney Phil's shadow.
Shamelessly imitated by its hungrier competitors and assorted other buck-chasing publishers, SI could sell 2 million Swimsuit Issues on newstands every February — to men and women.
SI tried various gimmicks to disguise the fact that it was nakedly exploiting mankind's most inexhaustible resource: beautiful and ably constructed young women posing in the sun or writhing in the turquoise surf of exotic beaches while wearing as little clothing as womanly possible.
The Swimsuit Issue, invented in 1964, was an embarrassing and exhausted idea long before the 2023 Woke Edition appeared with Martha Stewart, 81, on the cover and a few plus-sized beauties inside.
SI described it as being:
packed with 28 incredible women—all of whom were selected not only for their inner and outer beauty, but also for the ways in which they use their voices and platforms for good. Let’s meet them all!
I mocked SI’s Swimsuit Season in my first-ever magazines column for the LA Times in 1987 (see below) and for the next 17 years it often provided me with ‘news’ for my weekly columns in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Trib.
SI, RIP.
*****
Here’s a sampling of my column that exploited SI’s annual exploitation of beach girls from 1994 and the early 1990s.
Swimsuit Season, 30 years ago today
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feb. 10, 1994
Swimsuit Season, 1990 — but first a plea for ending the drug war.
From 1991 — 40 hot pages of non-sports.
‘Magazine Watch,’ Feb. 6, 1987 — The origin column
Finally, here’s my first ‘Magazine Watch’ column for the Los Angeles Times.
A free-lance effort for which I was paid $250 a week, it ran every Friday in the Times’ View section.
It lasted about six months, was readable and lively and was considered a success — until the little creep who was the editor of the View section decided to kill it one Friday without a word of warning to me.
In what was typically rotten newspaper behavior, ‘Magazine Watch’ was disappeared from the paper without explanation to the LAT’s 1.1 million readers.
The editor — not the same one who had accepted and blessed my column idea — later told me I could continue the column if I wrote it like I was a media reporter covering the business of the magazine industry.
It was a stupid idea that would turn a readable column of interest to anyone into a boring report of interest to no one. Plus, I had a full-time job as a copy editor and there was no way I could find the time to cover magazines the way he wanted.
So, as he apparently hoped, my columnizing career was over — until I got to Pittsburgh, where I’d write almost 800 weekly columns on magazines for the Post-Gazette and Trib until 2007.
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue, 1987
Sure, there are pieces on the America's Cup, last week's race at Daytona and how tough Big Ten basketball is this year. But real sports guys know what season it really is at Sports Illustrated: swimsuit spectacular time.
It's the usual splash, with a cover and 34 colorful inside pages full of seven models leaping, posing and cavorting in T-back tops arid bikinis and backless lace-up suits.
The sports angle? As dubious as always.
Cover girl Elle Macpherson, a former Aussie back-stroker, looks like she might be standing on a boat. And Kathy Ireland is lying draped in the rough of Teeth of the Dog golf course in Casa de Campa, Dominican Republic, where SI went to shoot its mid-winter tradition.
Everything looks pretty tasteful and tame this year, with no borderline outrageousness that Hef might envy.